An abandoned lunatic asylum is the perfect setting for a ghost story and Rosalind House, built in1845, is now the home of a “synergistic loving” community presided over by Smeaton Dunsmore, one of the narrators. The community rule is a volume called The Book of Light. Mostly they seem keen on gardening and carpentry. Another resident and narrator is Angela Fairley, who humorously refers herself as Fairy Angela, and is a psychic investigator searching the house for evidence of paranormal activity. Their community is joined by a couple, Ali and Jack, who ostensibly are in quest of a quiet retreat. She used to be a nurse and he a police officer, but the inquisitive Angela discovers evidence that there is something fishy in their past.

“I was fascinated by the paranormal, folklore, the seventeen-century witch trials…. I trained myself to read tarot, dabbled with Ouija boards … but it was pretty obvious that I didn’t possess a channel. So I … decided to make it my life’s work to prove the existence of ghosts” is Angela’s statement of her calling. She doesn’t experience the appearance of ghosts herself, but she tells Ali, “I think you can only see ghosts if you’re responsible for taking a life.” Ali herself has an experience of being attacked by something in the bath. Later she sights a wet child, a boy no one else can see. But he leaves footprints.

The Lingering was a superb Halloween read for me and I am delighted to welcome SJI Holliday to my my list of favourites that includes Susan Hill, Andrew Taylor, and F. G. Cottam. It is difficult to develop the classic ghost story to full-scale novel length. To make The Lingering work, Holliday has to introduce some themes from other genres. So besides the ghost of an old victim we have a serial killer on the loose and another traditional standby, pharmaceutical experiments. But though I found my credulity a trifle strained, The Lingering was a non-stop read. If you like plausible horror fiction, you should enjoy this story.

Crucial scenes in Putney are set not in London, but in Greece, especially the sexual consummation of the ill-starred relationship between the thirty-something Ralph Boyd and the thirteen-year-old Daphne Greenslay and their final encounter aboard a ferry boat whose name appropriately translates as Holy Nectar. This story is very much a Greek tragedy. Ralph re-enacts the pattern Aeschylus described: hubris attracts Nemesis, and though vengeance is slow – taking thirty-seven years – her aim is sure. We even have a Fury in the person of Daphne’s girlhood BF, who urges her to prosecute Ralph for this ancient crime. Daphne herself, now a recovering drug addict working as a travel agent specialising in Greek holidays, had seemed unaware of any psychologically damaging after effects of this crime till she noticed how her own thirteen-year-old daughter was developing her sexuality.

Britain is practically unique amongst civilized nations in having no statute of limitations for sex crimes. In most American states it varies between ten and twenty-one years (though not in Maryland, as many of us have become very aware recently). Even so, with a long history of drug abuse, Daphne would not be the most convincing witness against Ralph, now a distinguished composer, though diagnosed with cancer.

Daphne’s parents, Edmund and Ellie (for Eleftheria – why can’t modern Greeks pronounce an upsilon?), a writer and an activist lawyer, certainly put the SOUCE in insouciance; neither of them seemed to pay any attention to what must have been obviously a most unhealthy interest in their daughter on Ralph’s part. Which raises a problematic issue with this story. While the relationship between Ralph and Daphne is criminal and totally sick, for the story to generate pathos it also has to have a kind of terrible beauty. I had feared Putney might read like Lolita, but for me it didn’t. Ralph isn’t a usual paedophile – unlike Humbert Humbert he is not fixated on nymphettes. All of his other sexual relationships seem to be either with adult women or teenaged boys. I find him a full-blown victim of Aphrodite at her most careless. There may be undertones of the story of Daphne and Apollo as well, as Ralph is a musician and his first encounter with Daphne occurs in a treehouse. It’s not Daphne’s age that attracts Ralph, it’s her soul. Though he is totally selfish – especially in his treatment of his wife Nina – and utterly sleazy, he seemed to me perfectly to exemplify the contemporary expression ‘eyes wide shut’. Because the liaison began in the mid ’70s, when the antinomianism of the later ’60s was still prevalent, it is easy to imagine a bohemian like Ralph imagining he could get away with anything. Not even imagining; starkly insensible that there was anything wrong even though he has to go to a lot of trouble to disguise the relationship.

There is a school of criticism that holds Sophocles’ Oedipus actually knew his mother’s identity even before the events of the play. I do not believe that. But I am very taken with the parallels between the story of Oedipus and Putney, especially the denouement in Greece, that in several respects (including a visit to Thebes) is reminiscent of Oedipus at Colonus. In both cases we have an old man pursued by guilt for an unnatural relationship. Different readers will surely have quite varying responses to the fate of Ralph. Some will feel he gets off too lightly; others that the ending is appropriate and we can close the book with the sense that justice was done and perhaps the name of the boat wasn’t entirely ironic.

Because I love classical tragedy and the early potions of the book took place in London at the time in my life I felt most at home there (including the famous hot summer of ’76, the setting of so many marvelouslly moving stories including My Summer of Love and The Ladybird), I was reluctant to put this book down. If you’re not too repulsed by theme, you should find this a gripping read that will leave you with lots to consider.

Since first bursting onto the publishing scene with a true ghost story, Paranormal Intruder, the former police officer Caroline Mitchell has been one of the hardest working writers in the criminal fiction field. She started with DC Jennifer Knight, whose distinctivesupernatural powers of perception led her to catch murderers who were not only demonic, they really were demons! I really loved her. One of the principal weaknesses addicts of detective fiction reveal is an allergic response to the paranormal.

I expect every keen reader of police detective novels has a personal police force. As we read different authors, we recruit some of their main characters and reject others: Cassie Maddox and Lacey Flint are outstanding officers on mine – but I’d not let ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy or Antoinette Conway into the squad room, or any of those gross middle-aged men with bad figures who do Andy Dalziel imitations in so many current procedurals.Mitchell prefersto limit her detectives to three outings: Jennifer Knight was succeeded by Ruby Preston, a detective with more conventional abilities though with some dubious relationships. I’d definitely want Knight on my squad but Preston failed her probational in Love You to Death. Now we have Amy Winter in Truth and Lies. Winter’s distinction is having biological parents who were serial killers: sort of like Fred and Ruth West. Amy’s father is dead, but her mother is serving a life-tariff. As Amy was adopted by a police detective’s family and took their name, the force don’t know her real biological inheritance. But now her real mother is trying to manipulate her by offering to shed light on some of their old murders. Professionally of course that is a no-no, but locating the remains of the victims to help their families assuage their grief is a morally acceptable justification for cutting corners.

And whilst Amy is dealing with her imperiously monstrous mother, a child goes missing along with her pet cat, which provides a motive to introduce another delightfully unusual investigator, a veterinary expert on feline forensics. That alone should make many of us want to read this book. In addition to the Jennifer Knight stories and Ruby Preston, Mitchell has written a could of stand-alones. Witness is a psychological abuse story and I hated it. Silent Victim is a school story about an abusive student/teacher relationship that quite gripped me. So I was not surprised that in Truth and Lies Caroline Mitchell let her plot run away with her, tying up more loose ends than were left undone in the first place. Still, it’s an excellent story, Amy is an appealing character, and her mother is someone you’ll love to hate. I shall give The Secret Child, the next in the series, a chance.

Maidens’ Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal perhaps appears to have taken me forever to read (three years), but as it took place in a lost world that yet seems always just beyond my horizon in the past, savouring it slowly in snippets was the best way to enjoy it. During the Second World War, British women were required to participate in the war effort. The young Emma Smith grew bored serving as a typist in some War Office bureau (it was in fact the Secret Intelligence Service but still no less stultifying) and volunteered to become a ‘boater’, piloting canal boats carrying coal and metals back and forth from London to Birmingham. This book is a slightly fictionalised account first published in 1948. The crew consist of Emma, Nanette, and Charity, three young women in their late teens – the latter two composite portraits of the girls Emma worked with. What would now seem to most of us an absolute horror (and indeed many of the volunteers quickly found other assignments) of wet, cold, overwork, danger (drowning, being crushed between the boat and the wall of the lock, hitting your head on a bridge), lack of sleep, and wearing the same filthy jersey and trousers held together by safety pins, is made to sound like a delightful lark and a wonderful opportunity to escape the expectations of being a proper young lady. The other ‘boaters’ – the families that made their living working the canal – seem not quite to have known what to make of these middle-class girls. And their adventures dealing with the highly temperamental one-cylinder diesel engine brought back some nautical memories of my own.

I found out about Emma Smith when I read her memoir As Green as Grass and since I have read her novel The Far Cry. (You can find my reviews of these on this blog.) And I still wish I knew her as a person — as I’m only seventeen years younger, it would have been possible had I not discovered her way too late reading her memoir. But of course I couldn’t have known her as she was in 1943. But I still so admire the people of that generation, with their mixture of cultural sophistication and innocence, their courage and self-sacrifice, sense of belonging to each other, and especially common sense and humour. Even vicariously Emma Smith has been such a privilege to have known.

Clair Fuller’s first novel Our Endless Numbered Days utterly captured me with its strange tale of a father and daughter living out his survivalist fantasy for years alone in the woods and its bizarre aftermath. (Fortunately not at all like Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling’s repulsive treatment of a similar theme.) But Swimming Lessons, Claire Fuller’s second novel, failed to catch fire for me, perhaps because both the characters and the setting were very damp. The latest, Bitter Orange, is un-put-downable gripping though one would expect the principal character to be a drab. Frances presently lays dying in a palliative care unit and her memory keeps returning to the events of the summer of 1969 when her dull life took an unexpectedly exciting turn. Her mother finally died after Frances has spent years as her principal caregiver, barely maintaining a career as an architectural historian. Then she was hired by an American millionaire who had acquired a ruined mansion in Hampshire called Lyntons to appraise its grounds, probably to find valuable objets (such as a Palladian bridge) that could be dismantled for shipping overseas. But Frances finds she is sharing the place with a younger couple. Peter is an antiques dealer, his task to value the furnishings of the house, of which there appear to be none as the army wrecked the place when they requisitioned it during the war. (Sort of like in Brideshead Revisited.) Cara is an extravert given to voluble exclamations in Italian and preparing elaborate meals with nowhere to sit and nothing to eat off of but lots to drink. They look the ideal fun couple. Is Frances – who seems straight out of a novel by Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner — finally going to ‘get a life’ after all?

Then things start turning darker. Under the floorboards of Frances’s attic bathroom is a small telescope set as a spy glass to peer into the bathroom below that Cara and Peter share. Cara isn’t an Italian at all; she’s actually Irish and grew up in a smaller Ascendancy rattled ruin and the seeming fun-couple’s relationship reveals deep fissures. Peter is actually married to someone else whom he is still supporting. Cara is also a total fantasist with a lost baby in her past for which she gives utterly bizarre accounts. Then they discover ‘The Museum’ – the hiding place from the army for all the family valuables and jewellery. They have no key. To get in Peter has to take a sledgehammer to the door. Suddenly the three of them have furniture, tables and chairs and plates to eat off of. And being an antiques dealer, Peter knows how to turn hot artefacts into cold cash. What does Frances do? Does she write her employer and tell him about the treasure trove’s being looted? Of course she responds as I would have done (at least when I was younger) …

At this point I’d best leave the remainder of the story for the reader to discover. For me it was really affecting and disturbing, and yet like the best stories, perfectly appropriate and in character. It is fascinating how well Claire Fuller can use physical detail to create atmosphere, like the cabin in Our Endless Numbered Days and the huge piles of annotated books in Swimming Lessons. Here Frances’ botanical sampling knife, the telescope spy glass, the bridge covered with weeds, the memento-mori ring Cara adopts as a replacement wedding band, the cigarette case Peter gives Frances, the orange tree trapped in the glasshouse (which is also the name for a military prison) with its inedible fruit that gives the book a title, and the sledgehammer all play a sinister symbolic role in the tale. And the twists were so nicely prepared that they scarcely felt like twists and seemed to come just as they look inevitable.

Though Bitter Orange is definitely a five star, some nasty loose ends bother me and as the story runs on two tracks, past and present, to finality, I’ll always wonder about them. Why was the little telescope spyglass planted in the floor? Who was the father of Cara’s baby? How could Victor the priest, who’s at least ten years older than Frances, have officiated at her deathbed and burial? Was the bridge in the Palladian style and what became of it? Tho’ Bitter Orange is excellent, it is not quite the book I still await from Claire Fuller. That is the sequel to Our Endless Numbered Days, where we encounter Peggy again, as an adult.

Jennifer McCreavy, is a young Episcopal priest. As the story opens, she has just accepted a position as chaplain, mistress of a girls’ dorm called Blackburne House, and Latin teacher at Saint Aidan’s, a boarding school in Connecticut. But she has also embarked on an undercover mission. Her half-sister Cathy Foxcroft was a second-year student at the school. The previous April she was found hanged in a dormitory stairwell, presumed a suicide. That was totally out of character; Cathy liked school and had no history of depression or self-harm.

When Jen arrives at Saint Aidan’s at the beginning of term, she discovers that the school has fallen under the aegis of a glamorous couple, Antonia and Alastair Brucemoore, a wealthy manager of a secretive hedge-fund and her husband the school’s academic dean and drama coach. A couple of years ago, Saint Aidan’s was in dire financial straits, and the Brucemores assumed control. They live in mansion overlooking the school.

Tackling new responsibilities, Jen concentrates on revitalizing the spiritual life of the school, insuring the safety and welfare of the girls in her dorm, teaching Classics and religion, and coaching the field hockey team. She makes new friends among the students and staff, especially the 17 year-old Amber Talbott, the proctor who assists her in running the dorm, and establishes a close working relationship with Josiah Powel, the senior Classics master. From the school nurse, Jen learns that drug activity and sexually transmitted diseases are rampant on the campus and that Cathy had asked for an HIV test shortly before her death.

Gradually we become aware that Saint Aidan’s is under the influence of dark spiritual forces. These work to implicate Jen in a scandal that would destroy her ministry in the Church and her teaching career. As Jen continues her investigation, it appears the Brucemoores’ mansion is focus of drug activity, sexual abuse, and internet pedophile pornography. When one of girls in Jen’s house is abducted and placed in grave peril, Jen and her friends must risk everything to rescue her.

The Chaplain of Blackburne House is an exciting mystery thriller as well as realistic depiction of life at at a boarding school. We see both the best and the worst features of an elite educational institution and how Jen’s spiritual values and devotion transform the lives of her students, revealing the power of love, friendship and commitment summed up in the house Latin motto, Res Unius Res Omnium. Along with the spirituality, there are paranormal manifestations well. Readers who enjoy school stories and mystery thrillers, along with more than a touch of the supernatural, should enjoy following Jen’s adventures.

When we break a good resolution, we usually tell ourselves that it is only this one time and for a good reason. In my case, asking She Was the Quiet One from NetGalley after swearing only to request review copies of new books by authors I had previously read and liked was the specious attraction of the setting—Odell, a boarding school in New Hampshire. I had just completed a novel of my own set at a boarding school in New England that I thought it would be fun to compare notes on how it is done. In this case, Michele Campbell ought to have known that teachers are mandated reporters; that means they are required to report any instances of what they reasonably believe to be physical or sexual abuse to the appropriate authorities. In the case of Sarah and Heath Donovan, who are the housemasters of Moreland Hall, they are informed of a hazing incident when a girl in their dorm beaten on her bare buttocks with a leather slipper and a video posted on Snapchat, and they first concern was how it might affect Heath’s chances of becoming headmaster. As it turns out, the girl withdraws from school but her family sue the perpetrator’s family for the absurdly astronomic sum of $20 million, though the only lasting injury was to the victim’s self-esteem. I doubt law school was part of the author’s formation: later we see a lawyer imagining that asserting girl’s Miranda rights means that she cannot co-operate willingly with the police.

Two sisters are involved. Rose and Bel, fraternal twins. (Is it sexist to refer to twin sisters as “fraternal”? My dictionary doesn’t have an adjective derived from “soror.”) Orphaned, they are sent off to boarding school at the behest of granny’s lawyer (the one who’s not so up on Miranda) boyfriend. They are opposite personalities: Rose is studious and serious; Bel is unfocused and pliable, and finds herself involved in an affair with housemaster Heath Donovan, who is definitely the instigator and consummates their relationship at midnight in the laundry room of the dorm. There’s “a contest, which senior girl can bed Donovan”—I wondered why.

If one is going to portray illicit relationships between teacher and student, make it attractive; feature some class. Have the teacher at least pretend to sophistication, caring, attentive and considerate sexually, devoted to the student-lover’s intellectual maturity. What the Greeks called paidea. Instead Heath makes Bea slog through muddy winter woods to meet him in a car park and then he drives her to a sleazy motel where she finds out that his amatory technique is of the wham-bam variety. On route he orders her: “A car’s coming. Get down.’ She ducked into the passenger-side foot well, and rode down there the whole way to the motel.” Not exactly a romantic relationship.

Campbell provides us with the stock characters who populate the run-of-the-mill prep school story. There’s Darcy, the classic mean girl: “Life in Darcy’s circle was a big joke. The terrible pressures of Odell—the crushing workload, the college-admissions race, the sane three-hundred-page code [sic] of conduct manual—vanished at the flick of Darcy’s shiny, blond hair. Bel needed to be part of that.” Of course she’d be a blonde. Interestingly though, she hang around after her expulsion and contribute to a minor plot twist. And of course there’s the school bully. “Brandon was a mouth-breathing delinquent. He was also very, very rich, his dad being a real-estate billionaire”! Um! I wonder who he might be based on! And Heath and Sarah’s imagining that promotion to Headmaster and “first lady” (that’s really what somebody calls it in this book) will give them a life of abundance and easy and luxury instead of the endless rounds of fund-raising, ingratiating themselves to parents and potential parents, and scrupulous devotion to the welfare of every single student that the responsibilities of a real school head require.

Stylistically, Michele Campbell scarcely misses a cliché: “He bolted down the front path like he’d been shot from a cannon”; “Sarah was weak as a kitten”; “you scream like a banshee” are a few samples.

So, I have to add She Was the Quiet One to my growing list of bad school stories, that is to say, badly told stories about bad schools. Usually the implicit author of such novels seems to be suffering from a terminal case of class envy, portraying an institution run by bullies and snobs. I’ve written my own story about a school afflicted with some very evil characters. But if an author is aspiring to tragic dignity there should also be characters who genuinely care about formation and education and understand that the welfare of their students is their primary duty, however short they fall of their responsibilities. In this story we have instead an unintentional comedy with teachers who never engage in anything that remotely resembles education, a lawyer who knows nothing about criminal law, police detectives unacquainted with police procedure (they leave a suspected murderess in the school infirmary because she has flu symptoms), and a sleazy seducer whose idea of a love nest is the basement laundry room. Which last pretty much sums up the artistic, moral and educational values this school story inculcates.